Mountain Sustainability: Transforming Research Into Practice
The mountain.TRIP project, funded through the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme, will started in November 2009 and will run for 24 months.
The consortium is coordinated by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Institute of Mountain Research: Man & Environment), and also involves the Mountain Research Initiative, Euromontana, EcoLogic (Germany), Jagiellonian University (Poland), and the CMS.
The goal is to provide stakeholders, end-users and practitioners with readily accessible and understandable forms of research-based information relevant to sustainable development in mountain regions. Mountain.TRIP will start where other EU projects have finished, translating research findings into useful information and developing relationships between users and researchers. EU research projects generally focus on elucidating truths, not on communicating these truths to practitioners or the interested public.
Research projects often produce valuable results, methods, tools and instruments, but at the end of the project neither time nor money remain to disseminate these results among practitioners and to the interested public.
Furthermore, research results usually exist in forms recognized by the research community but not easily or quickly assimilated by communities of practice.
Mountain.TRIP will close the gap that currently exists between EU project findings and the needs of policy- and decision-makers, stakeholders in economy and environment, planners and administrators, non-governmental organisations, end-users, and other members of groups representing the interests of citizens and industry of the most important mountain regions of Europe.
Mountain.TRIP will not just disseminate research results, but will rather synthesize results from multiple EU funded projects while adapting the format of that synthesis through continuous interaction with practitioners to meet their needs.
For more information on mountain.TRIP please contact Catalina Munteanu.